It had been hard to see Robin van Persie's appearance on Monday night. He had just scored a trick to secure a 20th top-flight title for Manchester United and spent a while dancing around the message at Old Trafford chanting "Champi-oooo-nes"! Together with his teammates before being collared by the TELEVISION cameras. May he put into words how he felt at that moment, they wondered. "Well, really happy," he explained, a breaking across his face, "but it's weird, you know. I'd to hold back for such a long time for my first title." The smile did not disappear, but there clearly was a moment's pause -- probably only a nano-moment, but noticeable none the less -- as he surveyed the stands. Maybe he was simply trying to get it all in, to agree to memory every look and sound with this evening that he had waited such a long time for. But maybe there was a brief pang of sadness at the knowledge he could not have feasted on these snacks at Arsenal. When he spoke again, he appeared to reiterate the reason behind his move last summer; here, he was part of a team calibrated to get. "It is just fantastic, with a fantastic group, fantastic players," he explained, gesturing around him. "It is just a championship for every single one of them. This is our 20th concept, and I believe deserved." As fate might have it, United's first match as winners reaches Arsenal on Sunday. Before kickoff the Arsenal players will line up to create a of honor to applaud United's players, among them today Van Persie, onto the message. Undoubtedly the question came. Just how much was he getting excited about as a champion? time for the Emirates "Let me first love this moment," he said diplomatically, accepting the match ball and the man of the match trophy before rejoining the parties far from the cameras. The Emirates is surely the floor that Van Persie could have desired to visit this week-end. Though the statement announcing his decision to not extend the contract that would have run out come july 1st recommended some long-running frustrations -- "It has again become clear to me that we in lots of aspects argue on the way Arsenal FC should move forward" -- it also made clear how firmly Van Persie felt about Arsenal. "I enjoy the fans and the team, no matter what happens." PODCAST: Suarez's bar, Winners League, EPL They certainly were not hollow platitudes. Van Persie was just about to turn 26 when he signed a brand new deal by the end of the 2008-09 year, his second as Arsenal's top scorer. "I just can't picture myself in a different shirt," he explained, as the club announced a deal to help keep him there until at least his 30th birthday. While on holiday that summer he reflected on your choice. "If you look at other participants who is able to change lives, their utmost years are usually from oblique 25 to 30-ish," he said. "I offered my best years to Arsenal, basically, and this is one way I want it." How a sentence of such pleasure will need to have arrived at hurt over the years that people -- basketball fans, the press, broadcasters -- mentioned Arsenal's trophyless years ever higher. In 2009 he was growing into Thierry Henry's sneakers, increasingly the embodiment of the very best of Arsenal under Arsene Wenger; by last summer he will need to have felt increasingly like he was all that was left of it. Team building? The high-profile movements of Kolo Toure and Emmanuel Adebayor to Manchester City in 2009 were repeated in 2011 with the income of Gael Clichy and Samir Nasri. Cesc Fabregas finally went along to Barcelona, to be joined by Alex Song a couple of days after Van Persie signed at Old Trafford. The choice of Manchester United was unpleasant for Arsenal followers, who had at least been in a position to chastise them for being money-grabbers and sneer at their alumni at the Etihad. In selecting United, Van Persie made things more challenging. It was so obviously a selection while he was still in his primary inspired by successful trophies that to criticize him was also, and probably more severely, to criticize their own team. Van Persie had reached the final outcome that the last of his "best years" will be wasted on Arsenal. After the rage and disappointment, the shock and the resentment, Arsenal fans had the team put aside to bother about. Without Van Persie's 30 league goals in 2011-12, they determined, Arsenal could have been more than 25 items worse down, languishing somewhere around 15th place. Although Arsenal had coped without Van Persie at frequent intervals when he was hurt in the past, these quantities did actually signal catastrophe. WAHL: Bundesliga prominence, Landon Donovan, more mail Yet Arsenal has coped again. None of Olivier Giroud, Lukas Podolski and Santi Cazorla, who all appeared last summertime, is in the same course as Van Persie, but between them they have more than accounted for the Dutchman's objectives. Collection is two strikes worse off than at this point last time, Van Persie's most productive. Cazorla's 12 goals and seven assists, as well as his knowledge with Jack Wilshere, bode well. Mikel Arteta hasn't scored more goals than last year, but he has scored goals of greater significance, providing winners on three occasions, and along with his latest, a fee taken under huge pressure against Norwich City, helped regain Arsenal's edge in the pursuit for Champions League locations (3. Collection (63), 4. Chelsea (62), 5. Spurs (61). Theo Walcott still appears short of the player people imagined he would be right now, but only Chelsea's Juan Mata can better his 11 objectives and 10 assists this year. How much of this is just a convenience to Arsenal fans is uncertain, because there is already so much frustration at the club's transfer plans. The question of "what if Van Persie had stayed?" is moot because that would almost certainly have precluded one or more of last summer's signings. The question of "what if Arsenal was spending $30 million-plus on individual people, in the place of only trying to sell them at that price?" nags, too. Can Arsenal do a lot more than tread water in the Premier League, often in the Champions League but rarely in danger of earning it, with that type of investment? (Optimism for this summer might wilt at Wenger's entry that Chelsea's possible paying under a brand new director scares him.) That is section of why applauding United onto the message at the Emirates may hurt. It had been some time as a vintage Alex Ferguson area since anyone had talked of United, but his staff only missed out on protecting the title last year in the final minutes of the final day, on goal big difference. From that place Ferguson closed Van Persie for $37 million, plus Shinji Kagawa, a with Borussia Dortmund, for another $18.5 million as well as others, and has this year won the concept with four games to spare -- 16 points clear of City, 21 in front of Arsenal, and with a target huge difference remarkably more advanced than everybody else else's. And the director is crediting van Persie. "He is been unbelievable," explained Ferguson, who also described Monday's volley, a brand over-the-shoulder-and-bam! strike, as "goal of the century." "I think that he's to have a lot of the credit. I think his objectives tell you that, his effectiveness amounts told you that. In as any player I could imagine," Ferguson said, mentioning Eric Cantona, who served United from mid-table to the name in the 1992-93 season terms of impact, he's made as big an impact. "But I am sure Robin will be saying what a great couple of players he is had with him," said the United manager. Whether he intended a minor on the people Van Persie put aside, what spread like salt scattered over an open wound. HONIGSTEIN: How Dortmund got down Real Madrid
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